Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
One long night on the bridge somewhere in the North Atlantic while staring out into the black expanse, my mind proposed to me an odd hypothetical in the form of a "would you rather?". Would you rather be alone for eternity as the last man on Earth, or be together for eternity with a society of simpletons. At its root its the classic "human instrumentality" question, but its framing brought forth a more cogent basepoint on which I was able to project my personal imagination of what these scenarios would actually look like onto.
First the lonely man. I imagine him a shepherd, or possibly a gardener. Wandering over endless plains of grass and blue sky as he manages a small portion of the world insofar as he needs to sustain himself. Simple clothing and a simple diet to match his life of extreme simplicity. He has nothing to really work for except for that minimum he requires to survive, because his only real purpose is to ensure there exists one mind to perceive the world as proof of its existence. His mind would inevitable slow, but not dull: rather expand. His thoughts would become longer, more intricate and deep: a single thought could last for days as he mulls over the insignificant details of the case in more of a dream state than directed cognition. Eventually entire lifetimes could be spent in theoretical hallucinations, spending more of his time within himself than in the world he inhabits.
As for the man who lives with simpletons, I imagine him a small being, inherently different from but integrated into a society of small rabbit-like creatures. They're post-human but retain a form of "animus", being able to make decisions that alter their reality apart from their purely bestial instincts: but ultimately unable to change their own fates let alone the fate of the world. This man would become, after settling in for a few years, at a baseline "happier" than the lonely man: able to sate the chemical desires of his own mind through social interaction. Such a society would surely keep him very busy, even though he would only really be achieving that minimum requirement for existence that the former man does with comparatively much less effort. Conversely the busy man's mind will shrink and grow petty, albeit happy. He will only think of small things, the here and the now and the creature next to him. He will reject the open country of the lonely man for the enclosed spaces of burrows and tunnels where he can concentrate on his work. He would become like a drone bee in a hive, busying himself with his tiny world, thinking it to be of paramount importance. While instead the lonely man can see the whole world and can see it is insignificant.
As humans we tread the line between these two existences. One side of us is a social animal, being pleased and displeased by food, status and social interaction. The other side is a free soul, able to bring joy and sadness upon ourselves through the inventions of our own mind. The former mind is totally amoral. Like an animal it is unable to do right or wrong, perfectly following the laws of nature dumbly. The latter has to chose, it has no inherent knowledge of the correct course of action and must use its wits (reason and logic) to determine what is right and what is wrong. If a dumb beast kills another it is just nature, but if a moral being kills another its a grave act of sin. As creatures of both flesh bodies and intelligent souls we must juggle these two truths, not allowing ourselves to slip into dumb amorality, but not losing that connection to the world by becoming purely theoretical beings. By doing that we lose connection to the truths of the world from which we can intuit good from evil, although luckily we are chained to the world by our bodily needs.
The decision between these two paths was clear in my head at that time. An eternity of conscious solitude would be greatly preferable to losing my soul and becoming a worker drone forever, even if the chosen path would obviously bring anguish (although the "eternity of suffering" some interpretations of this dilemma portray seems dishonest). But as I explore further that path of a wandering shepherd collapsing into his own mind, the more I understand that its a fate altogether similar to that of the worker drone. As the shepherd's thoughts expand and expand, over the course of forever there would become a point at which he slips into an eternal thought experiment: a dream so complex and with so many diversions to explore that it would take forever to play them out. In this moment that man has become God. His mind has expanded to encompass a complete world, in which he is free to create and destroy beings which themselves have free will under the laws set out by himself. All those individual parts of him eventually separating into autonomous minds in and of themselves: separate but together with the fabric of his own mind. This state of being is no different from the drone; who, as his mind shrinks and shrinks and combines into the collective mass of society it rejoins the fabric of the universe as a truly integrated part. And by becoming a part of the whole he actually becomes the whole: for if each drop of water in the ocean is identical, each drop of water is the ocean itself. Boundless, infinite. And, at last, the two men are apart no longer. In this contraposition of two universal minds they can finally meet as two infinite beings overlapping with one another perfectly: just as the two parts of our humanity overlap. These two minds have combined and formed one man: me.
